Shadowforged (Light & Shadow)
Page 23
“I knew nothing of this,” the King exclaimed. He saw the truth in my face, and was stunned. But seeing his wide eyes, his horror, I found that I had no sympathy. This was not only an act for me.
“You never cared to know,” I shot back. “Miriel begged you not to tell the court, do you remember that? She knew that it would have her enemies she could not fight, she knew it would enrage her uncle. But you did not listen to her. You put her in terrible danger, and ever since—“
“Catwin.” Miriel’s voice was soft and sweet. She walked forward out of the shadows and put her hand on my arm to stop my tirade, and even knowing that this was a part of the act, I wanted to shake her hand off and go on, rail at the King for his blindness. He was shocked already, staring at me open-mouthed. No one had ever yelled at him in his life. He turned to Miriel, who smiled at him tremulously.
“Is this true?” he asked, and she bowed her head.
“You could not have known.” She was whispering, but she knew this room; her voice echoed off the beautiful, cold marble.
“I hurt you?” he asked, disbelieving. “I?”
“I swore I would not be angry.” Tears stood out in Miriel’s eyes. “Not then, and not when we disagreed. I told myself—you were the King. You were born a King, not an ordinary person. You could not understand, and that was as it should be—you should not.” There was a moment of dead silence while his face showed his uncertainty, and then he scowled.
“You betrayed me,” he said flatly. He knew, now, that what he had seen was only a part of the story, but it was an inescapable truth. Involuntarily, I looked to Miriel, who nodded, squaring her shoulders.
“I did,” she admitted, looking him straight in the eyes. “I crumbled. I looked into the brightness of your love and I was afraid—of what I am, of what you are.” I could never have delivered such a line with a straight face, but Miriel could. “I was afraid I would never be worthy of being your Queen…and now my fear has cost me everything.”
“Yes,” he said. “It has. And it has broken my heart. I will never forgive you.” I felt a wave of elation and despair. So it was over. The thing we had lied and cheated and betrayed to achieve—it was snatched away, out of our reach forever. There was no recovering now, we had gambled everything and lost…and now we were free. I was not sure what I wanted, but I let myself realize, at last, that it was not this life of lies.
Miriel was far from defeated; she would not be turned back so easily as that. She played on without a break: swallowing, nodding, looking down at the ground for a moment. Then she clasped her hands before her, twisting the fingers, and looked back to him.
“I thank you,” she said simply, “for your honesty. I had come here to ask you for one more chance to be the Queen you deserve.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “I know I did not even have the right to ask, but I could not go without knowing. Now I do. And I vow, you will have no argument from me and mine when you break the betrothal. I will admit what I have done if you wish it. And you need not tell my uncle. I will do so.” He stared back at her, swallowing. At her retreat, he was at a loss, torn between pride and love, and for all that I wanted Miriel to win—there lay our only path to safety—I was torn as well. I could not wish it with my whole heart.
“He will kill you,” the King said uncertainly, and I realized that he could not hold out. Not against her. Miriel saw it, too. She let no triumph show in her face, but she knew she had him. She swallowed, as if in fear, and there was a moment of pure silence.
Silence. I looked around myself, confused. We might have slipped into another world—I could hear nothing around us…
All at once, my hackles went up. Something was wrong—I might not know what, but I did know that every instinct screamed for me to run. I looked around myself wildly, missing whatever whispers the other were exchanging, and at last I put my finger on it. All this time, and not a sound from the hall. The guards should have changed—I knew their timing. And I remembered their faces now: men I had not seen before, their uniforms ill-fitting.
And now, faintly, so faint I thought I might hear only the frantic beat of my heart, I heard the tramp of a whole squadron. I waited for a moment, and heard it grow louder. It was all I needed to know; whatever form it took, death was coming. Panic washed over me.
“We have to leave,” I broke in. “Right now. Are there tunnels here?”
“What?” The King was bewildered, and I heard the tramp of soldiers growing ever closer. I did not hesitate. I grabbed Miriel’s hand and ran, yanking her after me, skidding to a stop and running back to pick up her cloak from the floor, and then running once more, making for an antechamber.
“Something’s happening,” I whispered fiercely over my shoulder to the King. “Run!” He did not follow us, he was frozen, looking to us and then the door, and I had no time to keep him safe. I turned, and took stock of the room: one window, too high for Miriel to climb, a table and a chair, and a wardrobe. As I began pushing the table beneath the window, I heard a shout outside the door, and the unmistakable thud of two bodies. “Get in the wardrobe,” I panted.
“What’s happening?” Miriel’s eyes were wide.
“I don’t know. Get inside!” The big double doors slammed open, echoing through the main chamber, as I heaved the table into place. It would have to do. I grabbed Miriel’s cloak and followed her, shutting the door behind us to a crack as quietly as I could, and crouching down next to her. We were hidden by the thick folds of the King’s cloaks, and I laid hers over our head so our eyes would not gleam and give us away.
“If they find us,” I breathed, “I’ll hold them off. Get on the table and climb out the window. You’ll have to break it. Then run, and get help.” She did not respond, and I could hear her breath coming in little sobs. Tentatively, not wishing to hurt her, I put my hand out to cover her mouth. Whoever was out there, we could not let them hear us.
“Who are you?” the King asked, his voice like a whiplash. “Why are you here?”
“Your Grace.” It was a voice I had never heard before, accented strangely. “I bid you good evening.”
“What is this?” the King demanded.
“This is the end, your Grace.” There was barely a pause, and then there was a choked off cry. I heard Miriel gasp in fear; my own mind had gone blank. Then the voice said, cold as deepest winter: “Sweep the rooms, kill any you find. His betrothed and her servant may be here—they must not be allowed to escape.”
Miriel was sobbing into my hand now. I could feel her tears wet on my skin, but she made no sound. We waited, breathless, as we heard the men tramp about. The minutes passed; I could feel every muscle tensed, beginning to scream with pain. I was finally beginning to believe that they had forgotten to search our room when I heard the leader’s voice.
“What about that one?”
“Yes, sir.” Oh, Gods. The door to our chamber opened, and footsteps approached. I readied myself as well as I could. If I could silence this man before he could call out—
A clamor in the main room, and both Miriel and I stiffened, the fear we had so tenuously controlled rising up until I thought I might vomit. There was the sudden sound of another group, and the clash of steel on steel. A was a jumble of voices, and Miriel and I curled closer together as our hunter exclaimed and hurried out of the room. “For the Gods!” I heard, and the clash of weapons. Above it all, a young man’s voice: “Garad!”
I do not know how long that battle took, how long we waited in the darkness for the fight to cease. I pictured Wilhelm, battling his way to Garad, to free his cousin from the grasp of the soldiers; I pictured the warrior that had such a cruel, cold voice. Huddled close to each other Miriel and I clenched each other’s hands and waited, hardly knowing what to hope for. It seemed to be hours before it ended, and yet at the same time, that it was over as quickly as it had begun. There was a silence: complete, stricken. And then the sound of broken sobbing. Fear began to creep in. What awaited us in that antechamber?
“Wilhelm Conradine, rise up.” The High Priest. So he had come with Wilhelm, to plead for clemency. I swallowed. Gods, if he had only come sooner…
And then the full importance of his words broke on me like a wave. Wilhelm Conradine, rise up. There was only one reason for the High priest to speak those words. In my head, I could hear Garad’s cry of pain—a whimper of fear so complete that I thought I might vomit. It had not only been the cry of the helpless, of a man held restrained as the soldiers swept the rooms for us. The gasp, Wilhelm’s grief, the ferocity I had heard in the Royal Guard, as they fought these intruders—all of it could mean only one thing. I felt my breath leave me in a second; I could hardly understand the thought.
Wilhelm, even as he must see the truth with his own eyes, did not seem to understand it. “Why?” he demanded. His voice broke on a sob.
“Ye must, milord,” a guardsman said gruffly, and I heard the clank as—to a man—the soldiers knelt.
“The King is dead,” the High Priest said, his voice carrying high above his pain. “Long live the King.” And to a man, they echoed him:
“The King is dead. Long live the King.”
Chapter 25
Long live the King—
—Wilhelm Conradine, rise up—
His betrothed and her servant may be here—
The last phrase stuck in my mind. It was shock, I knew it, but I could not think of anything else. The phrase rolled around and around in my head as Miriel and I crouched, frozen with fear and stifling even our breathing. His betrothed and her servant may be here. Had they only suspected that we might be here, knowing that Miriel and the King were inseparable? Or had they known? Had someone told them? Who had known that we might be here tonight? Who had we told? The High Priest might have known. The Duke might have known—
“Catwin.” Miriel tugged on my sleeve. “We should go out.”
“No.” I gripped her arm to stop her from pushing the door open. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t know what’s going on.”
“What do you mean?” Our heads were craned together, our voices barely a whisper, but still I made a shushing noise. I could sense her glare even in the dark; she must speak it, she must make sense of it. “Those men came in here—“
“Yes! Those men. Who were they?”
“I thought—the accent—Kasimir?”
“But do you know?” Miriel stared at me, and I realized she did not want to know. She did not want to think, because the more she thought, the more she realized that she had been seconds from death. When she thought, she would remember that Garad’s body lay on the floor, and that even if she could bring herself to forget the horror of the murder, the rest of her life lay in ruins as well.
“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know anything. I—“
“Shhh!” Her voice had been starting to rise, and I clamped my hand back over her mouth. We sat for a moment in silence, both of us terrified that we had been heard; I knew that I did not want us found here, not even by our supposed allies. And what would the court say if ever they knew that Miriel had been in the King’s chambers when he was executed, and survived?
“What do we do, then?” Miriel asked finally, her voice the barest hint of a whisper. I could hear her breath coming short, but her voice was deathly calm, the cold rationality of shock. I had to get us out of here before we both descended into raving madness. I thought, and came to the only option:
“We have to go to the Duke.”
“What?”
“Quiet! We have a lot more to lose by hiding from him than going to him. If we run away now, he’ll think we had a hand in this. And anyway, no matter how angry he is, it’s safest—he had the least to gain from any of this.” That, at least, rang true, but a little voice in my head whispered, and he was also one of the only ones who knew you were going to be here. And you told that lie, and now he hates you.
“He’ll kill me,” Miriel whispered, a morbid echo of Garad’s words only—what—ten minutes past. This felt unreal; I wanted to wake up. I could feel my mind slipping away into shock, and I shook my head as violently as I dared, trying to clear it.
“We just have to get out of here…” I murmured. “We have to wait until they go.” Miriel made no response, and so we did wait, in silence, our muscles aching more and more as we stayed curled, frozen in fear. We waited while the King’s body was loaded onto a bier to be carried to the Cathedral, and I thought unexpectedly of Isra, being woken in the night to hear that her only child was dead by murder. My throat tightened.
When the way was clear, and the room empty, I pushed the door of the wardrobe open. We emerged, stumbling on cramped legs and blinking at the light of the oil lamps in the next room, and I wrapped Miriel’s cloak around her shoulders, for in our silence, the shock had hit her in earnest: she was shivering violently. For the first time, I gave thanks for Temar’s insistence that I learn to push away my fear until I had the safety to stop and think. I stooped to look into Miriel’s eyes until at last they focused on me.
“You need to close your eyes,” I told her. I was not sure she could see what lay in the room outside without breaking down entirely. I guided her through, mindful that she held her gown out of the way of the pools of blood, and got her into the servants’ corridor. “Can you wait here a moment?”
“Why?” Her teeth were chattering.
“I need to look at the…” Bodies. “…soldiers. I’ll be back.” In the room, I spent a moment looking over things, trying to commit the smallest details to memory, and then crept to the body of their leader. He wore armor that would look, to any casual observer, like the uniform of the Royal Guard; they had disguised themselves to sneak into the palace. Oddly, I was relieved—this was not a detachment of the Guard itself, then. Carefully, I pushed his braid aside and studied his neck, his hands, his wrists, looking for tattoos. Nothing. His dagger was finely wrought, though, made with ripples in the metal. Hastily, suddenly afraid of being found here, I grabbed the knife and left. I paused outside, seeing the two new guards who had greeted us earlier; their throats had been slit, and I wondered now if they had been accomplices, sacrificed for the illusion of two factions.
That was a very interesting thought.
I guided Miriel carefully through the darkness, knowing that I should speak to her and yet too preoccupied with my own thoughts to concentrate. When we emerged into the main hallways by the Duke’s rooms, I heard the strident tones of his guards, and the clipped speech of a Royal Messenger. I pushed Miriel back and closed the door behind us as the man went past, and when he was gone we darted out and around the corner. Seeing our white faces, the Duke’s guards did not even ask why we were there; they swung open the doors without comment.
The Duke was pulling on his coat as we came into the room, and Temar was hastily slipping his minor arsenal of weapons into the various concealed pockets of his suit. Both of them stopped what they were doing when they saw us. I saw their instinctive anger at the sight of us, but even the Duke was cautious—they knew from our faces that something was terribly wrong, and I judged from their own that the Royal Messenger had not divulged the earth-shattering news of the King’s death. I tried to find the words to speak, but Miriel broke the silence first.
“The King is dead.” Her voice trembled.
“What?” It was Temar. He had gone whiter than I had ever seen him. The Duke was frozen in shock. I found my tongue at last.
“Assassinated,” I said. “Someone sent a detachment of soldiers, dressed like the Royal Guard. I heard them coming and hid Miriel in an antechamber.”
“Are they still in the Palace?” The commander in the Duke awoke. I saw he was ready to call for reinforcements, knew that he was bent on vengeance. I shook my head.
“No. The High Priest came with the true guard. They were…too late. But they wer
e able to kill the soldiers who were there already.” Temar and the Duke exchanged a look, the glance between Light and Shadow, the sharing of something far beyond words, beneath conscious thought.
“I must go,” the Duke said abruptly. “I have been summoned to a Council meeting.” Slowly, his face changed. His jaw tightened. “The King,” he said softly, bitterly, “has called a Council meeting.” He had not realized, until then, how completely his chances lay in ruins. Another King, years more of courting favor. “You two, stay here.” He made for the door, but as it swung open, he turned to look at us. “You swear you had no part in this?” he asked dangerously. Miriel gasped, but I held firm. I would have wondered the same of him, if his surprise had not betrayed him.
“We swear,” I said, my voice even. He nodded curtly.
“I’ll make a plan when I return. Do not leave this room, and for the love of the Gods, do not open the door to anyone. If they have any sense, they’ll come for Miriel, too.”
“The Council, or the assassins?” I asked. It was Temar who answered.
“Both.”
The Duke waited a moment more. “Do not think this erases your betrayal,” he said, softly. “I will deal with you when I get back. Do not even think of running.” And they were gone, the two of them as grim as I had ever seen.
I managed to get Miriel to a chair and myself to another before my legs gave out. I wanted to laugh hysterically. The Duke could never have realized how little his anger meant to us now. What we had seen in that chamber was more horrifying by far. After a while, I realized that I was rocking back and forth wordlessly; Miriel was crying. Her sobs had gone hoarse, and she was muffling them into her hand as if she were still hidden, still listening to the footsteps of the soldiers coming closer and closer to our hiding place.
“It’s so much worse,” she choked out, and I nodded, not trusting myself to speak without crying, or vomiting on the Duke’s polished floors and fine carpets. It was worse—far worse than when the man had come to poison Miriel, worse than when we had found the poison in our food. To be so close to death, and spared for no reason—chance had placed us there, and luck alone had saved us, and it made no sense. My mind could not accept that I was still alive. I had only to close my eyes for the feelings of terror to rush back and choke me.